The contest dragged on until one of his men shouted for him. Looking startled, Farrell ducked into the trailer, rifle at the low ready. Seconds later, the boom of a shotgun thundered from a room near the far end of the trailer followed by shouting and the staccato rattle of M-4s firing in a confined space.

“Shit,” Dad said, accelerating toward the trailer.

More gunfire sounded, and as we skidded to a halt near the front door, a high, agonized scream came from within the trailer. Someone shouted, “Get it off him! Get that fucking thing off him!”

I entered the house behind my father. Mike and Blake were behind us. We turned left and headed toward the shouting at the end of a far hallway. The trailer was laid out like many others I had seen: the front door opened into the living room, to the right was a bedroom, bathroom, and laundry room, the kitchen was separated from the living room by a low island counter, and to my left was a long hallway with more bedrooms and another bathroom. The commotion came from the far bedroom at the end of the hallway. The four of us took a few brief moments to clear the rooms on our right—the doors were closed and Farrell’s men had not used their orange spray paint to mark them as clear—then pushed on to see what the shouting was about.

On the way, we heard a guttural growling and snarling beneath the continuing high-pitched screams of one of Farrell’s men. I had never heard a scream like that in my life, and hoped I never would again.

Fate, sadly, did not conspire to grant that wish.

A soldier’s dead body lay in the entrance to the bedroom, no doubt the victim of the shotgun blast from a few moments earlier. The shot had taken him in the chest and splattered blood, flesh, and chunks of bone in a wide cone-like pattern halfway down the length of the hallway. Mike seized him by the handle on the back of his vest and dragged him into the kitchen, out of the way. Once there, he grabbed a blanket from one of the bedrooms and draped it over him.

The room the rest of us walked into was small, crowded with soldiers, and so thick with foul odor the smell nearly made me gag. A combination of body odor, rotting meat, spent cordite, and vomit hung suspended in the thick air. There was a final crack of a rifle, deafeningly loud in the confined space, and the shouting stopped. The men in front of us went still, eyes looking down at something we could not see past them.

“All right, clear the goddamn room,” my father shouted. So firm was his tone of command, no one questioned him. They simply turned and filed out, gathering in the hallway. “Go on,” Dad said, shooing them along. “Wait outside.”

They did as ordered, faces stunned, muttering among themselves. Farrell remained behind, squatting next to a bleeding soldier and trying to bandage a massive wound on the stricken man’s forearm. A few feet away, a naked woman, mid-forties by the look of her, lay on the ground with a gaping exit wound in the back of her head. Her hands were tied behind her back, a rope trailing behind her toward the wall. By her mottled skin and milky white eyes—not to mention the gore smeared around her mouth—it was obvious she was one of the infected.

My eyes tracked the rope across the room to where a portly, middle-aged man lay slumped against the wall. A shotgun lay at his feet, and he clutched a hunting knife in his left hand. A quick glance around the room told the story of what happened.

The infected woman’s bound hands were secured to an eyebolt driven into the floor. A short length of rope allowed her to move halfway toward the entrance, but no further. Flies buzzed on smears of blood and scraps of bones scattered across the bare plywood flooring.

There was a picture on the wall next to me of the two people when they were alive. It looked recent. They were standing on a pier, the bright sunny ocean behind them, holding cocktails and smiling at the camera, arms around each other’s shoulders.

“Let me guess,” Blake said behind me. “The wife got infected, and the husband was keeping her alive in here. Feeding her.”

“Feeding her what?” Dad asked.

I bent down and examined a few bones. I recognized the shoulder blade and leg bones of a wild pig. “Looks like he hunted for it.”

After poking around a little more, I moved aside a coyote skull and came across an adult human femur still connected to the hipbone by dried black tendons. Disgusted, I kicked it away. “And it looks like he wasn’t too discriminating about what he shot.”

My father looked across the room at the dead man, his filthy shirt dotted with at least a dozen bloody 5.56mm holes. From the look on his face, any pity he might have felt for the man had left town on its fastest horse. “Sick son of a bitch.”

“It gets worse,” Blake said, standing over the eyebolt. He reached down and picked up a frayed end of rope. “Looks like when he knew he was done for, he had just enough left in the tank to cut his wife loose.” Blake dropped the rope and stepped away. “He turned her loose on them.”

Dad looked down at Farrell. “Does that about cover what happened here?”

The young sergeant did not look up, just nodded, eyes fixed on the dead infected woman. Next to him, the bitten soldier held his arm to his chest, rocking slowly back and forth, face pale white, lips blue, eyes pressed together and streaming tears. A steady litany of whispered curses issued from his mouth, repeating to himself how fucked he was.

My father looked at the bitten man, then at Farrell, and then with the sudden, blinding speed he was capable of when roused to anger, he gripped the bigger man by the shoulders, lifted him to his feet, and slammed him against the wall.

“What the hell were you thinking letting your men drink, you idiot?” he roared. “What if they had been focused? What if they had been paying attention to what they were doing? None of this would have happened!”

Farrell’s face twisted in anger, the reptilian mercilessness I saw earlier returning, and he tried to struggle out of my father’s grip. His struggles quickly ceased when Dad’s fist slammed into his breadbasket with the force of a battering ram. Farrell let out a surprised OOOF and doubled over, giving my father the opening he needed to run him across the room and slam him head first into the opposite wall. The sergeant hit with enough impact to shatter the wood paneling, his legs going limp beneath him. Dad snatched his sidearm from its holster and reared back for a pistol whip, but I got to him first and lifted him bodily.

“Dad, no. For Christ’s sake, calm down before you kill somebody.” He went stiff as I carried him from the room, but offered no resistance. I put him down in the kitchen and held his shoulders while he took deep breaths, eyes closed, the redness in his face slowly receding.

“Sorry about that, son,” he said finally, holstering his pistol. “Kind of lost it for a minute there.”

“Yeah, you think?”

He laughed shakily and wiped a hand across the back of his neck. “Think he’s gonna be all right?”

“Farrell?”

“Yeah.”

I shrugged. “Probably. You should go back to the Humvee, though. Alvarado will be here any minute. Let me and Blake do the talking.”

Dad nodded. “Where’d Mike go?”

Just as he said it, the big Marine came through the front door with a couple of heavy-duty contractor trash bags. When he saw us looking at him, he said, “We still have a job to do. There’s food in that kitchen.”

Dad went back to the vehicle while I stayed behind. Blake helped Farrell to his feet and escorted him outside, then grabbed a couple of volunteers to help him drag the dead body out of the kitchen and into the driveway. Just as they were wrapping him in a sheet, Alvarado stopped out front and practically flew from the driver’s side door.

He walked directly up to Farrell, who still looked a little dazed from the beating he had taken, and yelled, “What the fuck happened here?”